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The Culture of Cloth

The Culture of Cloth

Released: 2026-05-17
© 2026 The Culture of Cloth
The Culture of Cloth - QR Code
3 Episodes
Audio
Listen on Apple Podcasts
3 Episodes
Audio
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Released: 2026-05-17
© 2026 The Culture of Cloth
Most Recent Episode
The Dictionary Was Named After a Woman Weaver

The Dictionary Was Named After a Woman Weaver

There's a word you use every single day that used to mean woven fabric. And the most authoritative dictionary in the English language is named, etymologically, after a medieval woman weaver. In this episode we follow the thread from Old English occupati
Time: 17:16
There's a word you use every single day that used to mean woven fabric. And the most authoritative dictionary in the English language is named, etymologically, after a medieval woman weaver.
In this episode we follow the thread from Old English occupational suffixes through spinster, webster, and the World Wide Web, to Noah Webster, the Hattori clan, and the myth of Arachne. Women's textile labour was so economically central that it got encoded into the language itself, into surnames carried by families who have no idea what their name originally meant.
If you carry a surname like Webster, Baxter, Brewster, Tucker, Fuller, Walker, Weaver, Tkachenko or Hattori then this episode is about you.
Want to find out if your surname has a textile origin? Start here:
Behind the Name surname database: surnames.behindthename.com 
SurnameDB (49,000+ names): surnamedb.com Forebears (31 million surnames with distribution maps): forebears.io/surnames
Find me on Instagram at @veronicatuckerthelabel. The Culture of Cloth is produced and hosted by Veronica Tucker.
Episode ID: 1000768232998
GUID: Buzzsprout-19189400
Release Date: 17/05/2026, 13:30:00

Description

Clothing is never just clothing.Every fibre, every colour, every silhouette is telling you something. About power, politics and whose story got told and whose didn’t. The Culture of Cloth is a podcast about learning to read that story. Starting with the cloth itself and then following it wherever it leads.Most fashion history looks at the outside. This show looks at the inside. The construction, the decisions, the invisible hands that made it, and the world those hands were living in. 
The women who encoded military intelligence into knitting. The weavers whose binary logic built the first computer. The dyers, the spinners, the pattern cutters whose names were never written down.Cloth tells the truth even when the official record doesn’t.For makers and thinkers. For everyone who has ever looked at a garment and felt there was more to it than they were being told.Hosted by Veronica Tucker.

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